@NRA There Is So Much Wrong With You. I Don’t Even Know Where To Start

Oh, wait, yes I do. Bear with me y’all. This will all come to together in a few paragraphs.

Full disclosure: I’ve never heard one word Chief Keef has ever said out loud. I’m not a rap fan and unless this guy is the second coming of KRS-One, which he isn’t because KRS-One is still doing radio, I will probably never hear a word he says out loud. So, he’s pretty high on the list of people I don’t care about.

Django Unchained? I’ll probably see it eventually If I can overcome my profound disappointment that it isn’t a biopic of Django Reinhardt, I may even end up going to see it in theaters.

A – played a lot of Mario Kart as a kid, yet I’ve never once seen her hurl a banana at someone who cut us off in traffic.

I’m a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series but I don’t carry around.a sword bigger than the chair I’m currently sitting in. Neither do I mug people and animals for materia. I mean, I totally would do that but materia is fictional and shit. So there’s no point.

Also, despite what New Zealand may want us to believe for touristing purposes, The Shire does not exist. It’s fictional. I know this because it originated in a book of fiction.

Sparkly vampires? Fictional.

The “thug life” of most rap songs? Fictional.On those rare occasions when they aren’t fictional, they’re observational, which I’ll get to in a minute.

You see what I did there? Fictional things are fictional. This, apparently, is information that you in the NRA do not have because today at your press conference you blamed a whole host of fictional things for the deaths in Newtown, CT and deaths from guns in general.

In fairness, you aren’t the only ones who have this problem. It seems that Chief Keef guy is the cause of gun violence in Chicago and I’m not really sure how that works out in someone’s brain but OK. You and the guy who wrote that blog are making fundamentally the same point and you’re both totally wrong.

This again, is a fundamental logical fallacy. In this case the one called Affirming the Consequent; entertainment is violent. People commit violent acts. Thus violence acts happen because of music, movies television and games. Actually, it’s about five logical fallacies all in one but this is the one I’m going with because it is most precise and it’s one I haven’t talked about before.

As far as I understand it, said Romans were even less enamored of rap music than I am. Humans are not violent because our entertainment or even our overall culture is violent. Humans build culture. We are responsible for it as we are responsible for the entertainment contained therein. Our entertainment is violent because people are violent and we always bloody well have been. It’s really beyond time to stop pretending that decades old movies and music; Natural Born Killers and Marylin Manson as well as the more current forms of entertainment are the cause of violence.

While we’re at it can we stop allowing people to derail the conversations we should be having; how to mitigate the effects of violent outbursts, in favor of the conversation they want to be having; the fundamental causes of violence in human beings. The first is a discussion about real problems with potential solutions. The other is an interesting philosophical exercise. Could we maybe stay on solutions? Because, you know, people are dying and we should possibly concerned about trying to make that happen less often and specifically making that harder to accomplish.

That’s the crux. That’s the fundamental issue. People are dying. We need to do what we can to slow the rate at which that happens. And here’s the really important thing, we already know how to slow the rate at which that happens. So we have a problem and we have a solution.

Closers don’t make excuses. Closers don’t bitch about the leads. They don’t blame the music. They don’t ignore the problem or pretend that the solution is more problem. Closers don’t just take responsibility when they are responsible. And in case you are somehow still laboring under the misapprehension that you are not the problem please allow me to make it clear to you, you are the fucking problem. Closers look at an issue that has nothing to do with them, an issue that they can factually and unequivocally define as completely unrelated to them and ask what they can do to solve the problem.

What you do is the opposite of that. You make excuses. You lie. You whine about how the big kids are bullying you and in the same breath you demand that those same big kids pay you and the people you front for in order to not solve the problem. You’re losers.

Losers insist the leads are weak. You blame whatever they can blame because to do otherwise, to take responsibility for your complete and utter failure to protect anything other than profit margins of arms manufacturers, would mean you have to change. And to change is to undercut your own profit margin. You’re losers.

The rational human beings of this nation? Those of us who look at the numbers and the facts and reach toward solutions? The closers? We’re more than willing to go up against you because we see you for what you are. On our collective behalf, I have one message for you.